By now I’m sure you’ve heard the story about the 15-year-old girl who bought a ticket and boarded a plane without ever being asked to show her ID. The teen from Alaska apparently neglected to ask her parents permission to take the flight and now the girl’s mom says the airline is partially to blame for her daughter ending up hundreds of miles from home.
In all fairness to the mother, she’s not slapping the airlines with a lawsuit (at least not yet anyway), though she is lobbying to get the carrier to reconsider its current policies. For those of you who are not up to speed on this incident here’s what happened: A self-described “typical” set of parents living in Juneau, Alaska woke up one morning last month to find that their teen daughter had vanished in the middle of the night.
The Pringles maintain their daughter was a fun-loving teenager who enjoyed spending time online. They say they closely monitored their daughter and made her share her password. In fact, the teen’s mom reportedly even got her own page to link to her daughter’s website so she could further monitor it. However, as it turns out, despite being as proactive as they were the Pringles were unaware their daughter was stealing money from them and planning to run away to North Carolina with a high school boy she met online.
According to airline officials, the teen showed up at the airport ticket counter in person and forked over a bunch of ones and fives to pay for a ticket and never once was questioned about her motives.
“I was flabbergasted because she looks 15 years old, she is 15 years old,” the girl’s mom told news reporters. “I would think that they would have said, ‘Let me call your mommy or your daddy and see if this is OK.'”
But no one did. In fact, not only did no one with the airline question the teen at the ticket counter, no one asked her for ID when she boarded the Alaska Airlines flight either.
Sounds odd, doesn’t it? Well, not to workers at the Transportation Security Administration, which maintains that it only requires passengers older than 18 years old to show a photo ID. According to TSA big wigs, the teen “was appropriately screened and posed no security threat.” TSA agents did tell news reporters that the teen would have been stopped if an Amber Alert had been issued.
The entire incident has sparked outrage in the law enforcement community. Veteran police officers have gone public saying that the airline dropped the ball and that a 15-year-old girl walking up to a ticket counter, handing over cash in small denominations, and traveling without an ID should have raised some serious red flags.
For the record, individual airlines set their own policies for unaccompanied minors and Alaska Airlines does allow children older than 13 to travel by themselves. What’s more, like many forms of public transportation, there is not an age requirement to purchase an airline ticket, according to TSA executives.
Regardless, the teen’s parents and members of law enforcement agree that the airline bears some responsibility in this situation.
Do you agree that the ticket agent should have questioned the girl or do you think the employee was just doing her job?
By the way, the Pringles’ daughter never made it to see her online boyfriend in North Carolina. Authorities in Seattle were able to intercept the teen before she got on her connecting flight and sent her back to Alaska.
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